Addressing famous stories from different points of view

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” I recommended the novel to a young friend and decided it had been so long since I’d read it, I’d best do a reread if I wanted to be prepared for any meaningful discussion.

Poor Lily. Spoiler alert: so beautiful and so tragically doomed by New York’s high society in the late 19th century, and by the mere fact that she’s a woman. Talk about having no agency.

At the same time that I was ruminating about Lily, I received an email from a reader wondering if I’d ever considered a column about the literary niche of minor characters retelling a famous story from their point of view. If so, she had a list of such books and was happy to share. The writer of the email, Pat Everitt, is a retired English teacher who taught for 44 years, 33 of them at Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo. She’s my kind of perceptive, voracious reader.

After perusing her impressive list, it occurred to me that if Lily’s story could be retold, by an emboldened Lawrence Selden, say, or a remorseful Mrs. Peniston, she could have a fresh start.

Such is the case with Bertha Mason, the violently insane “madwoman in the attic” and first wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” Jean Rhys comes to Bertha’s rescue in “Wide Sargasso Sea.” The novel is told from the point of view of the “madwoman” herself, who, in Rhys’ retelling, is born Antoinette Cosway in Jamaica before Rochester renames her Bertha.

The dark, brooding Rochester is reimagined as a chronically unfaithful and emotionally abusive husband who locks his wife in the attic and hides her from the world. The book is decidedly feminist and anticolonial — Rochester rejects “Bertha” in part due to her Creole heritage, hastening her descent into madness. Sort of puts Jane in a whole new light.

In “March,” Geraldine Brooks imagines the Civil War experiences of Robert March, the absent patriarch and military chaplain in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” Nothing in the letters Mr. March writes home in Alcott’s book — which remind his family to bear their burdens cheerfully and not complain about their poverty — reveals the violence, devastation and moral complexities of the Civil War as Brooks’ story does.

We also learn of March’s relationship with Grace, a beautiful slave whom he had taught to read and fallen in love with many years earlier. And we get a glimpse into his courtship of a fiery Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the cause of his family’s genteel poverty.

Then there’s the quintessential evil stepmother queen in the Grimms’ “Snow White,” so obsessed with being “the fairest in the land” that she hatches numerous plans to kill the titular hero. After a huntsman, unable to kill the beautiful princess as the queen has commanded, brings her the lungs and liver of a wild boar rather than Snow White’s, she eats them. Truly witchy.

Neil Gaiman rehabilitates the evil queen in his short story “Snow, Glass Apples.” Gaiman’s little princess is a monstrous vampire who kills her father, the king and a fair number of forest folk. Then things get really weird in that dark, creepy, only Neil Gaimancandoit way, with doses of incest, pedophilia and necrophilia.

Thanks to Everitt, I now have a long list of wellknown tales retold, including “Grendel” by John Gardner (“Beowulf” from the monster’s POV), “Ahab’s Wife” by Sena Naslund (“Moby Dick”) and “Longbourn” by J.A. Baker (“Pride and Prejudice,” according to the servants.).

I’m still waiting for someone to resuscitate Lily Bart. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I’d love to see her end up happily in love with Selden or, far more subversive for her time, Gerty Farish.